Apple Pushes to End DRM

February 7, 2007

Apple Pushes to End DRM

Steve Jobs calls on the music industry to drop its use of digital rights management software.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs hates
digital rights management (DRM)–and he wants you to know that the
music industry is responsible for those restrictions on entertainment
that keep people from ripping, mixing, and burning their own media.

Let me first start by saying that Jobs’s apparent change of heart about DRM is long overdue. I’ve been a (flip and sarcastic) critic
of his draconian view of digital rights management, which has raised
the hackles of the Apple community. But Jobs’s voice is a welcome
addition to the discussion about looking for ways to promote an
environment that includes unrestricted media files.

However,
let’s not be misled by the press response to his post. Jobs isn’t
leading this discussion. There have been countless voices, from
RealNetworks’ Rob Glaser to MP3.com’s Michael Robertson and all of the
digital-entertainment companies that went out of business in 2000 and
2001 because music companies refused to deal with them. Moreover, I
don’t believe Jobs is doing this out of some altruistic belief that
unrestricted is better.

The most obvious reason for Jobs’s post: Apple is receiving some heat
in Europe because of the iPod and iTunes, the hardware-software
connection that locks out competitors from developing add-ons. The
company has trotted out the age-old argument that if it allows other
people to develop on its network, it can’t guarantee that the network
will be secure.

With his “Thoughts on Music” post, Jobs is deftly trying to switch the attention from his monopoly to the music industry’s oligopoly.

Now,
I don’t believe Jobs should be lambasted for making a corporate
decision–or even for launching a corporate public-relations
ploy–simply because it makes good business sense and not because it’s the right thing. Jobs’s primary responsibility as Apple’s CEO is to the bottom line, while operating within the bounds of the law.

He should make decisions that make the most sense financially.

Apple
is given too much credit for being the scrappy little computer company
that could; it’s just a company. It has positives (great interface
design, plug-and-play products) and negatives (a terrible record on the
environment, closed networks).

When it comes to DRM, though, Jobs has the rare opportunity to inject actual
change in the digital-media landscape while also promoting the
financial well-being of his company, even if that means opening up the
Apple architecture to allow competitors to play on the same landscape.

Mark
Cuban, the outspoken founder of Broadcast.com, said that if he couldn’t
compete with free, then he didn’t have a business. And for Jobs, it’s
unlikely that additional competition in the unrestricted digital-media
market would be bad for Apple. It would likely have the opposite
effect. With more media available, and with Apple’s user-friendly
plug-and-play applications, the company would likely see great growth
in its products.

The decision to move in this direction
would make sense, particularly on the heels of the decision to change
the company’s name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc., a symbolic
gesture that signals its decision to move away from personal computing
and into the consumer-electronics and digital-entertainment space.

If
Jobs is serious about the exploration of a digital-media environment
that, at the very least, has viable unrestricted alternatives alongside
restricted alternatives, we may very well be on the verge of a changing
landscape online.

Jobs has the ear of the entertainment
industry in a way that Microsoft, RealNetworks, and scads of other
companies never have. If he builds it, those companies will follow.